“He was where he wanted to be”, testifies one of her friends

“What comforts me a little today is that he was where he wanted to be“, testifies Wednesday on franceinfo Méryl Serthelon, longtime friend of Arman Soldin and journalist for the weekly The Renaissance of Loir-et-Cher. The AFP journalist died on Tuesday, killed by Russian rocket fire in Chassiv Yar, near Bakhmout, in the east of the country.

>>> War in Ukraine: journalist Arman Soldin was killed near Bakhmout

Méryl Serthelon, who knew the journalist on the benches of the university had written about the work of Arman Soldin on the Ukrainian front in The Renaissance of Loir-et-Cher. She remembers “the university, our beginnings as journalists: the first reporting exercises that we often did in pairs. Arman was always smiling, the good joke“, insists Méryl Serthelon, “you can ask the whole class, we will all tell you that he made us laugh a lot and that we all noticed his talent.”

“We were also a little scared“, continues the journalist, “because we knew he was taking risks. He too was aware of it, he had told me“. But Arman Soldin also assures him that he is not afraid: “He really liked this alternation between these phases of adrenaline on the forehead and the calmer, resting phases. He had really taken a liking to it, he was willing to leave (…) he came close to death several times but he wanted to be as close as possible to the conflict, to do his job as a journalist. I am proud to have known him and to have shared these years with him.“.